Color & Cut
Mark R. Hunt
Karl wakes up slow, deliberately. He has psoriatic arthritis now and does exercises in his bed to get the
blood flowing before he flips off the covers and sets his feet on the floor. He sits on the edge of the bed
and rotates his ankles, stretches his arms out on either side, and cranks his head around on his
shoulders before getting up to find his pajama bottoms, turtle neck and slippers. They are moving it out
this morning to make it down to their daughter’s house in Evanston before she goes to work at the salon
at 2:30. They want to have some time with her before they babysit Oscar and Eleanor – their four year
old and the eleven month old beautiful grandchildren. They haven’t seen them for over three weeks,
and they won’t see them again until Thanksgiving, which is still two weeks out. But the main reason
they cooked up the idea is because Nancy, Karl’s wife of forty four years, told him on the berm, watching
the sunset go down over the lake two nights before, that she would be going to a new hair salon in
Sturgeon Bay to get her color and cut; and, that it would be costing her over $150 to get it done. She
made the comment, “no wonder Anna,” their hair stylist daughter down in Evanston, “makes so much
money.” She shook her head and just could not believe how all these women could spend so much
money on their hair. That’s when Karl came up with the idea to just go down on Thursday, make a visit
with Anna, get her hair done, babysit the kids and come back on Friday afternoon. Well, it turned out
that they’d be staying overnight on Friday as well. Apparently, Anna had some school fund raiser she
had to go to on Friday night, and Adam, her husband, would already be flying out to Arizona for a work
conference. Anna and the kids would be flying down to join him for an extended week at his father’s
house with a pool in Phoenix, where apparently the weather was forecasted to be cooler than usual.
Karl was on-board with all of it. He was enjoying the exploratory freedom of retired life. They just had
to get home sometime on Saturday because they’d been invited to go to the Packer game on Sunday
with the Foresters, some new friends they’d made up in Door County. Karl told Nancy when they passed
in the kitchen by the coffee pot that he hoped she gotten a good night’s rest – this was going to be a big
weekend.
The ride down took just under four hours. WGN 720 on the radio, once they got south of Green Bay,
was reporting on the terror attacks in Paris. Over 120 had been killed and there were hundreds more
wounded. ISIS was claiming responsibility and saying there would be more to follow. They were
cleansing the world of the filthy infidels. Paris was the European heart for everything that was wrong
with humans in the world. It was their suicidal mission to take them down and burn their remains. They
wrapped themselves with suicide bombs and went into restaurants, soccer events and musical concerts
to methodically line innocent people up and shoot them in the back of the head. It was the most
horrible news to be listening to since the 911 attacks. They drank more coffee and pulled off at the
McDonald’s Citgo in Sheboygan for a potty break, a couple of bacon egg and cheese bagels, and some
fresh coffee. Asked if she wanted a plastic cup for any water, Nancy first said no. Then she
reconsidered and said, yes, that would be great. When she got to the beverage dispenser, she overfilled
the cup with ice – sending three or four of the shooting cubes to the floor. Then she forgot to press the
little water button attached to the bluish beverage on the machine, and she filled the cup half up with
what she thought looked awfully blue for water. Realizing what she’d done, she poured the whole thing
out into the hole on the machine that led to the garbage and started over – again with the super
charged ice dispenser, she sent more cubes to the floor, but then getting the right button pushed, she
filled the cup with water. Karl made for the door. When he got to it, he turned and held it open for her,
but now she had disappeared somewhere else in the store. Karl was well adjusted to situations like
these with Nancy. Forty-four years of marriage, two grown kids, five wonderful grandchildren all under
the age of eleven, each with their own personal quirks and personalities, a son and daughter in law with
multiple attending brothers and sisters and the far-flung in-law parents – biding his time and waiting
another moment or two for Nancyland to emerge from the chaotic gridlock was the easiest thing he
knew how to do. When she finally did come around the corner with the cup of water and a hand full of
napkins she had a knowing sheepish smile on her face, like, “what else were you expecting?” Karl held
the door open and pretended that everything was absolutely normal – which it was.
When they got to their daughters house in Evanston, they had to remember the code to the garage
door. Anna and the kids were still out running errands. They fumbled for their phones and the notes
app to pull up the four digit code. The garage door opened with aching groans and they let themselves
into the house. Anna and Adam had thankfully moved out of the inner city two years ago and into the
wonderfully remodelled two story red brick house with the deck overlooking the big back yard with the
giant swing hanging from the maple tree on Crawford Avenue. Derby, their twelve year old unkillable
bull dog, met them when they came in. He had become a cranky old man that now stunk and could not
be satisfied. When he was in he wanted to go out. When he was out, he wanted to come in. Nancy
reached down to pet the dog and Derby turned around to give her his butt. “Why does he always do
that,” she said, setting her bag down on the leather couch. “Oh, Derby, come on now. You know Nana
loves you.” Karl made his way around this scene carrying the two small suitcases and a half dozen
hangers of clothes. He mumbled under his breath as he passed, “no, I believe Nana has other plans for
Derby.” - “Oh, sush,” Nana said, sitting down on the couch to pet the surly dog.
Ten minutes later they heard the car pull up and the familiar sounds of Oscar, the four year old,
escaping into the house. Karl told Nancy to hide and he fought his way into the small closet just beyond
the front door at the foot of the stairs that led up to the second floor. Anna and the kids came in and
called out for Boompan and Nana. “Where are they?” she said. “Are they hiding?” Oscar went tearing
through the house on the search. He found Nana right away. She was hiding in plain sight behind
Eleanor’s height chair. “Boo,” she said, and they all laughed and thought it was fun. “But where’s
Boompan,” Anna said, carrying Leni and coming through the kitchen into the living room. Oscar was now
running wild through the place, screaming and laughing. Boompan rattled the door to the closet, not
wanting this to go on much longer, as a vacuum cleaner handle was sticking into the center of his lower
back that he’d slathered with Amish Deep Penetrating Pain Relief Ointment earlier that morning. Oscar
went wild and the door got pulled open and Boompan chased him onto the couch and smothered him in
a bear hug. Oscar was plugged into the wall. He could get pretty excited about things like this.
Halloween was only about ten days ago. It took a few minutes to get him calmed down. Karl had to be
careful with his brainyack ideas, particularly when young children were involved. Their plan was to take
the kids to some fancy Children’s Museum when Anna went to work. They were going to have an outing.
Which after getting all their gear down into the basement spare bedroom, and visiting with Anna for a
while, is what they did. They took all the directions, loaded the Map Quest directions onto Karl’s phone,
got the lesson on the car seats, Eleanor’s diaper bag fully stocked, and then headed for the museum.
Anna predicted that Eleanor might fall asleep in the car, but it was Oscar’s head that went flipping
sideways not five minutes out of the driveway. Eleanor was looking out the windows and saying “High,”
and then, “Bye” and blinking her big blue eyes at the autumn leaves falling out of the trees as they
negotiated Chicago traffic down Lake Avenue above the Old Orchard Shopping Center. Nancy made the
comment again about how she grew up not ten miles from here, but she could not live here now with all
this traffic.
When they found the Kohl’s Children’s Museum out in Glenview, Oscar was still sound asleep in his car
seat and Eleanor was wide eyed and stinking up the Mazda’s backseat with what they were pretty sure
was a major mess in her pants. They decided to drive around a while longer to let Oscar sleep. As long as
Eleanor wasn’t wigging out, they drove through the shopping center and then up and down the local
streets and alleyways. Finally, around 3:30 PM, they decided they’d better park the car to change Leni’s
pants and just let Oscar sleep until he woke up – which he did when they were extricating Leni from the
straps and tie-downs of the car seat. He was not a happy camper. He started to cry and Karl helped
Nancy get Leni out of the car and into the stroller. Without the lesson from Anna, they’d have been
there struggling with the straps and clips until hell froze over. So, Nancy took Leni inside the museum to
change her pants and Karl stayed behind to negotiate with the irate four year old. Oscar, a brilliantly
handsome little four year old, basically has two speeds. He’s either over the top, pedal to the metal,
playing his heart out, or he’s wigging out about somebody else’s idea about what he should be wearing,
or doing. Karl pulled every trick he had out of his bag and tossed it into the fray. He cried along with
Oscar. He got out of the car and leaned back against the door in plain view. He started dancing like he
was auditioning for Dancing with the Stars. He gyrated all over the place, turning circles and whacking
himself in the butt. He did the swim, the pony, the Watusi. He walked like an Egyptian and wandered
with the stroll. When Karl got back into the car, Oscar was still wigging. He had the determination and
fortitude of a kid twice his age and size. Karl’s years raising his own kids, and his decade with the
delinquent program back in Rockford came to his aid. He didn’t panic. He started singing folk ballads and
show tunes. Oscar rev’d up his eruptions and screamed at Karl to stop it. Karl found the granola bar that
Anna had tossed into the car console at the last minute on send-off. He opened it in plain view of Oscar
and asked him if he wanted it. “No,” shot back the sharp reply. “Okay, then I guess Boompan will eat it.”
Karl started to slowly move the half opened tasty treat towards his mouth. Oscar screamed, “no, I do
want it,” and kept on crying. Karl turned slowly towards the backseat and offered the treat as a peace
treaty. “Okay Killer, but you need to slow your role and stop with the crazy screaming and crying.” To
which Oscar took it back up another notch and kept the wigging going at full tilt. Karl shook his head and
held onto the bargaining chip, slowly turning back towards the front of the car. The screaming went
higher and hard to believe, it intensified into what could only be called a full blown rage. Karl got back
out of the car and leaned with his back against the car door. He made the comment to a young family
coming out of the museum pushing a baby stroller with a four year old of their own in tow, “nothing to
see here, just move along. He’ll be okay.” Then, as they passed, smiling with full understanding and
empathy, “any advice for grandpa would be welcomed.” The mother laughed, “just hang in there.” He
couldn’t see if Oscar was watching him because the Mazda’s back windows had a dark tint to them. He
didn’t want to be looking directly at the little guy anyways. Then Nancy came back out of the museum
into the parking lot with Leni in the stroller. She was smiling and told Karl that when she got inside the
front door she told the person that was greeting the visitors that she had a baby with a poopy diaper,
and the man simply pointed at the woman's bathroom in the adjacent hallway, like he'd done it a million
times before. Karl opened the back door to the SUV and helped Nancy extricate Leni from the stroller
and back into her car seat. They were all pretty well set to just strap her back in and head for home.
Nancy had gotten a good peak inside at the museum and asked Oscar, now sobbing in his misery puddle
in his car seat, if he was sure he didn’t want to go to the museum. “You love the museum Oscar. Come
on, we’re here. Who knows when Boompan and Nana will ever get back to this wonderful place. Don’t
you want to show us how cool it is?” And like turning off a faucet, the tears stopped, his sleeves ran
horizontally across his face, smearing snot across his cheek, and he was good to go. Karl told Nancy that
he’d handle Eleanor, and that she could be in charge of getting Oscar out of the car and into the
museum. Karl had Eleanor back out of her car seat and into the stroller and was half way into the
museum before looking back to see how Nancy was faring with the wild child of Borneo.
Once in the museum, Oscar took to it like a fish to water. He’d been to this rodeo many times before.
He went straight for the first exhibit on the right with the giant car set and the gravity track that fed the
cars down a half dozen s-curves and then back to the floor below where they started. Three tries at that
and he was on to the next one – a set of twenty foot balloon figures that you could pump air into by
slamming the levers on the outside of the display up and down. This was some major fun. It was a
Thursday afternoon and the place was full of kids, their parents, guardians, and grandparents. They had
it pretty well organized with a bunch of volunteers running around helping and watching out for the kids
and their babysitters. One guy did nothing but set and reset all the displaced and dislodged pieces to the
puzzles the various displays had in them. The exhibits were sponsored by the likes of Kraft Foods, Kohl’s
Department Stores (hence the name), and dozens of other profoundly successful companies. Karl
pushed Leni around in the stroller for the first hour while Oscar went from display to display, pulling the
triggers, climbing the walls, and jumping from the desert across the open water on the island platforms
to land on the other side where Nana was waiting for him. The place was built for four year olds. He got
into it a little with a couple of other boys around his age that were hogging the plastic wheel barrows
that the cloth covered bean bags would fall into from out of the barn window at the top of the conveyer
belt, but Nana distracted him back over to the water pistol exhibit where he could shoot water at
moving objects. Above all else, Oscar loved to push buttons, pull triggers and shoot things.
Karl pulled Eleanor from the stroller eventually and crawled up with her into a low slung rubber
cushioned exhibit in one of the less populated corners of the place. She loved it. At eleven months, she
was starting to crawl around and was getting quite animated. She smiled from ear to ear and took off in
every direction, rolling back up onto her butt, her big eyes popping at all the commotion in the place. By
4:53 PM Karl and Nancy were exhausted and pulling the kids back out to head for home. They’d gotten
the news that the place closed at 5:00 PM. Oscar saw some swords he wanted in a bin by the door of the
retail store they had attached to the museum on their way out. He broke the rules of running into the
store without supervision when he saw what he wanted. Karl had to chase after him and pacify the
handicapped gatekeeper who was now screaming that no kids were allowed into the store without adult
supervision – again arguing and pulling on the arms of the four year old over what he wanted and what
the reality was going to be. By the time they got home it was dark outside.
On Friday morning Boompan and Oscar went out onto the deck to clean up the mess a recent wind
storm had caused. The big umbrella up on their plexiglass deck table had gotten blown over in the wind
storm, shattering the quarter inch plexiglass table top into a gillion pieces onto the deck. The umbrella
was found on the other side of the fence that surrounded the deck the next day. The first step was to
get Oscar into the right outfit. Anna did her best to help in this regard, but the little shaver was having
nothing to do with the full winter coat, gloves and hat that she was recommending. He wanted nothing
to do with the heavy gear. He wound up in a lighter jacket and hat. Boompan did the best he could
getting a pair of cotton gloves on his little hands. It took a half dozen tries on either hand. He'd get two
or more fingers into one or more of the finger slots at each effort, until it became funny to them both.
The gloves lasted about a minute out on the deck and the hat was kitty-wampus and then off completely
right behind it. He wanted the hatchet, the multi-tool scraper and the hammer. He had the opinion early
on that Boompan was helping Oscar with the job instead of the other way around. Boompan, by the
way, was the grandpa name Karl had been christened with early on by his first grandson, Henry Hunt.
The easy part was getting the piles of plastic shards swept up into the dustpan and into the garbage
can. The hard part was extricating the thousands of tiny plastic bits that had gotten trapped in the cracks
between the deck boards. This was a job of either poking them down through the crack into a shallow
grave where they'd never be seen again, or scraping them out to be sucked up into the shop vac - which
Oscar immediately took ownership of as his machine. He sucked up everything and anything he could
with that magic hose. Stray leaves that had fallen on the deck were his favorites by far. He got pretty
excited to see them get sucked up onto the outer edge of the rubber hose, then it didn't take him long
to figure out that if he just gave it a little poke it would quickly disappear with that addictive sucking
noise. The roar of the shop vac, the wild hose, the brittle leaf - he was both terrified and in love the shop
vac. When Boompan would need it to get more of the plastic shards sucked up, it was Oscar that had to
do it. He wasn't giving up the commanding controls of that machine. It didn't take Boompan long to
figure out that he needed a short stool to be sitting on, instead of the constant ups and downs off the
deck. Once that was in place, it was his pleasure to simply sit and watch his grandson exploring his
world with his new powerful suction toy. In an hour they'd done the best they could at cleaning up the
mess, then they were off to the garage and out on the front driveway, sucking and blowing the leaves
out onto Crawford Avenue.
In the house Anna was giving Nana her color and cut and Leni was loose on the living room floor with
the bull dog, rolling from pillar to post, mostly content with herself and the world in general. She was
the biggest baby girl for her age that any of them had ever seen. When they picked her up, they said it
was like picking up a bag of cement. When Karl and Oscar came in for a break, Nana was sitting in one of
the living room chairs, thumbing a Woman’s Day magazine with the towel around her neck and her hair
was flying straight out in every direction with tape and coloring goo slathered between sections.
"Pretty, eh," she smiled back when Karl sat down across from her to study just what it was that was
going on. These were shots that men only see in movies that have women's beauty parlor scenes in
them. It's a little shocking for a man with a fairly tight crew cut to see what women go through to get
their hair the way they think they want it.
Nana and Anna had a running conversation going about everything and anything. They could
seemingly ramble on and on, forever, about the minutia of their lives. Oscar needed a juice cup and
curled up on the corner of the couch to watch more George on the Ipad. Boompan made a ginseng tea
and sat on the end of the couch to recover and watch the reporting on the flat screen TV of the
aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris. Anna came in and out of the kitchen balancing the juice cup,
Nana's hair job, Leni's proximity to the dog, the lunch she had going in the kitchen, a text from her
husband at his work seminar in Arizona, the pack job for their flights on the following day, and the other
thing she forgot to tell Nana about her friend Brenda, and her marriage break up with the three kids to
her husband, Bill. The city bus rambled and wooshed south on Crawford, stopping with squeaky breaks
a block south for a pick-up.